Well, you don’t need to use die to get information from $!:

#! perl
use Modern::Perl;

for my $file ('465_SoPW.pl', 'Non-Existent.txt')
{
    if (my @stats = stat $file)
    {
        say "File '$file' last modified: ", $stats[9];
    }
    else
    {
        say "stat failed for file '$file': $!";
    }
}
[download]

Output (on my machine):

 0:17 >perl 466_SoPW.pl
File '465_SoPW.pl' last modified: 1357188675
stat failed for file 'Non-Existent.txt': No such file or directory

 0:17 >
[download]

Hope that helps,

The solution was $! and, as Athanasius points out, die had nothing to do with it other than to illustrate that the variable is available ;-)